You’ve been paying attention to your fans and followers on your established networks and they’ve been asking why you’re not on That New Social Network, so you signed up, if only to reserve your brand’s handle. Your target audience is here, but you haven’t posted anything yet. So. . .now what? What should you do first?

Start with these three steps.

1. Research, research, and then research some more.

How are people using this space? This is likely to shift as the network becomes more established and more users join and experiment with what it has to offer, but it’s always a good idea to know the existing protocol backwards and forwards before you start posting.

Always be sure your content fits the place but is still true to your brand’s voice and core values.

2. Ask your audience: What do you want to see from us here?

How do you figure out what your audience wants from you in a specific place? Try asking them. Ask them on the new network, ask them on your established networks. Send out a survey via email, or tweet and Facebook links to a survey asking what they’d like out of your social media presence, including on the new platform.

3. Test, measure, plan, repeat.

Experiment with different types of content, pay very close attention to the results, and base your strategy going forward on those results. What is touted as a best practice on a new network might not necessarily be what your specific audience wants to see from you in that specific place.

Don’t be afraid to take risks and try new things. Anything your audience reacts positively towards isn’t something to just repeat ad nauseam, but to analyze and figure out what about it worked and why. Then use those elements in all of your content strategy moving forward.

It’s Friday and that means it’s time for This Week in Social Analytics with our favorite posts of the past week in the world of measurement, analytics, and social media. See a great piece we missed? Link to it in the comments, or tell us about it on Twitter or Facebook.

“In order to overcome resource, strategy and budget issues, marketers should consider having someone directly responsible for an overall content marketing strategy, as well as auditing, reusing and repurposing content.”

Apart from engaging customers, the role of visual content is to reinforce your brand. For that to happen, your content needs to have consistency.

This isn’t strictly a new law, but it’s worth reinforcing. We’re not referring to publishing visual content consistently. It’s more about elements in your visuals that tell your target market that the visual is from your company – even if you’re not linked or tagged in it.

Normally when you see a headline that ends in a question, you know it can immediately be answered with “no”. In this case, however, the answer is a resounding “yes”:

“YouTubers also had a much bigger influence on purchase intent among teens, as 63% said they would try a product or brand suggested by a YouTuber. In comparison, fewer than half of respondents said the same about recommendations from a TV or movie star.”

“. . .to truly develop real-time, online buzz for an event, marketers must seek out genuine, nonintrusive ways for the brand to be included in the event content being shared to social. This means marketers need an event marketing strategy that taps into existing social habits of the audience.”

“Employees are the major social media opportunity most businesses overlook.

. . .

Change how you view your employees. See them as real people who have their own relationships, needs and interests beyond your business. Further, they’re experienced social media users who engage with their family and friends on a variety of networks.”

“In 2015, social networks have demonstrably changed the word-of-mouth distribution model. Forty-seven percent of all U.S. adults use Facebook daily, 25 times the number of total daily social media users a decade earlier. While Jonah Berger’s research in Contagious: Why Things Catch On indicates that face-to-face word-of-mouth is more effective than social media word-of-mouth, social media is not an insignificant contributor to word-of-mouth ‘buzz.’”

It seems like there’s a new, hot social network The Kids Today are talking about just about every day. So how do you know when it’s time for your brand to check it out and seriously considering joining? After all, you don’t want to sink time and resources into something that loses steam inside of a few weeks.

Look for the following signs before you decide to sign up.

A talking statue is not one of the signs, sadly. Photo via SEO on Flickr. Used with permission of the Creative Commons License.

1. You notice your customers or target audience discussing The New Network on other, established social networks.

Here it’s very important to pay attention to how they’re discussing it; if you just count the number of mentions without noticing that everyone is making fun of the new network rather than praising it, well, you might be making a huge mistake in joining.

Tone can and will shift over time though. It’s not too distant of a memory that brands didn’t take any social networks seriously, and now they’re the backbone of many a big brand campaign. The key here is to listen to what your customers and target audience want from you.

Which brings us to our next point.

2. Your customers or target audience are flat out asking you why you aren’t there, or when you’re joining.

One request to join a new obscure network can be just that, but if you’re repeatedly seeing your fans and followers on your established networks asking why they don’t see you on their new favorite network, it’s definitely time to consider joining. They’ll only ask for so long before they’ll look for someone else in that space who can fill their needs.

3. When the competition is there.

This can be a balancing act, depending on the resources you have compared to the resources your competitor has. If they have 10x the budget and staff that you do, they obviously will be more equipped to establish a strategic presence on every network. If your team is already overworked and understaffed, then new networks are at the bottom of the to-do list.

Don’t ignore the first two signs though; they can act as a warning signal that your customers or target audience may be shifting their time spend to another network. It can be frustrating to redistribute resources to uncharted territory- especially if you feel like you’re just hitting your groove where you already are- but the alternative is watching your competition snap up your customers because you were too slow to adapt.

Bonus: When the competition isn’t there.

If you are the brand that has the resources (or a small team that has the masochism), moving into uncharted territory can make you the undisputed king of it as it is more widely adopted. Just be sure to pay attention to how your customers and target audience are using the new network and be responsive to their needs.

The bottom line?

The cardinal rules of social media always apply: Listen first, and always work to solve problems and provide value in any space that you occupy.

Last fall, Medialogue, a digital agency based in Brazil, was tasked with monitoring social conversation about the 2014 Brazilian Presidential election for the Aécio Neves campaign and supporting the efforts of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party. Medialogue selected Union Metrics’ TweetReach Twitter analytics to support this effort.

The Brazilian 2014 presidential election was a record-breaking event for the country on social media, even compared to the 2010 election, on which Medialogue also worked. The sheer volume of conversation on social media surpassed all estimates based on the previous national election, generating more than 40 million total tweets. However, by using TweetReach to sort through the noise, Medialogue was able to make informed social media recommendations back to their client.

It’s Friday and that means it’s time for This Week in Social Analytics with our favorite posts of the past week in the world of measurement, analytics, and social media. See a great piece we missed? Link to it in the comments, or tell us about it on Twitter or Facebook.

“Believe it or not, there is even an industry term for this way of infusing your brand with personality. Marketing analysts call it the “personality differentiator.” Here’s what it can do for your business:

It demonstrates why you are different from others who provide very similar products or services.

It engages your audience capturing their interest and drawing them into your message.

It establishes an ongoing rapport between you and your audience, creating a bond that will help you convert leads into clients when the time is right.

It proves there is more to you and your brand than just facts, figures, and fancy technology. It shows you actually have heart.

It transforms your message from boring to fascinating, increasing both the impact of your message as well as the quality of the opportunities your messaging generates.”

Teens spend more time on visually based platforms like Snapchat and Instagram, but that doesn’t mean that Facebook is going to instantly disappear.

“[Facebook is a] long way from being replaced by the younger group. Right now, they’re just not going to spend a lot of time there.

Facebook did what Myspace was trying to do. Facebook allows you to stay in touch with your friends and family in an easy way. It’s hard to imagine something coming along that’s going to get that mass and that will do it in a more effective way than how Facebook is doing it now.”

“Long-form content, particularly in the guise of investigative journalism, is a dying art. The instantaneous information age has left news publishers cutting budgets for investigative journalists, focusing instead on cheaper quick-fire click-bait, short-form stories and listicles. What little investigative journalist remains is usually reserved to more niche publications.

Too many news publications have wrongly assumed that incredibly connected and time-poor audiences have no desire for long-form content. They’re wrong.

Are brands going to replace genuine investigative journalism? Probably not. There is arguably too much self-interest for branded investigative content to be taken seriously enough by audiences. However, they are certainly capable of filling the gap for long-form that mainstream publishers leave behind in the pursuit of replicating Buzzfeed and Shortlist.”

“Some 59% of respondents cited video as among their most difficult content types to create, ahead of webinars/online events (50%) and research/white papers (50%). But almost half of respondents (46%) reported videos to be among the most effective content types used, second only to articles and case studies (54%).”

It’s Friday and that means it’s time for This Week in Social Analytics with our favorite posts of the past week in the world of measurement, analytics, and social media. See a great piece we missed? Link to it in the comments, or tell us about it on Twitter or Facebook.

“The value of a marketing platform for a brand can be gauged to a certain extent by asking these questions:

Who are its primary users?

How popular is it with them?

Do these users fit the bill as your brand’s target audience?

What is the closest alternative to target these users?

Now consider this:

Snapchat has a median user age of 18 years, with the majority of its users between 13 and 25 years of age. Facebook on the other hand, has an average user age of 40 years. The last few years in fact, have seen a sharp decline in teen users on Facebook.”

“Add DIY Videos to Your Content Pieces. Following the same approach, don’t hesitate to post videos that complement your written ideas and basically convey a very simple message: “I’m the author, I’m real, I’m here for you, my readers!” Whether you choose to record Skype interviews or combine text, images and music in simple programs such as Animoto to reach your audience, uncomplicated DIY videos will help you amplify your messages and boost their realness and overall power of seduction.”

“. . .let’s be honest for a minute. At the end of the day, the meat is still what matters the most. This means that if the core message that your publication/post conveys is subpar, no amount of great visuals will make it popular.

If, on the other hand, you do know that what you’re publishing is worth of your audience’s time, good visuals can be the difference between making the piece mildly well received vs. making it a true hit.”

“While eMarketer doesn’t forecast last year’s 60% growth rate being matched in the years to come, the platform should maintain double-digit growth until 2018, when it will exceed 100 million US users and reach almost one-third of the US internet population.”

Today, we’re excited to announce a new and improved TweetReach Pro dashboard! The new dashboard includes our brand new Twitter analytics insight stream, as well as updated Tracker comparisons and much more. The new TweetReach Pro dashboard will help you better understand:

Important changes in follower growth, engagement and potential impressions

What Tweets, hashtags and URLs are popular

How one Twitter account’s performance compares to others

Who’s active or influential in a particular community

Exactly what to do next to improve post engagement

The details on your new Twitter insights

We’re really excited about the brand new insight stream, which features a number of actionable data-based insights built to help you identify important changes in your metrics and decide what steps to take next to improve your Twitter performance. The insight stream includes information like spikes in impressions or retweets, above-average follower growth, and the best time for you to post to get more engagement.

We’ve also upgraded the Tracker overview in your dashboard, which allows you to more easily compare Trackers at a glance. See how different Twitter accounts or topics measure up, who’s getting more engagement when, when potential reach and impressions spike, and more.

Finally, we’ve added an all-new what’s hot section that highlights popular elements in your Trackers, including the most retweeted Tweet, most influential contributor and most popular hashtag and URL. Use these highlights to easily see what’s trending across your Trackers.

Want insights across social channels?

And now you can access our insights and dashboard for any of the social media channels we analyze, which includes Instagram and Tumblr. This makes it even easier to track your social media campaigns across platforms and quickly see what’s working and what isn’t. Interested in learning more about our full social suite? Let’s talk!

The lamentations of Twitter display cards being turned off for Instagram posts may have died out, but the need to measure all aspects of a content marketing strategy has only intensified, particularly when it comes to the visual. So how can you track and measure your Instagram content’s performance on Twitter? Let us show you how, using TweetReach.

The basics of URL tracking with TweetReach

The best way to keep track via TweetReach of how an Instagram photo travels around Twitter is by tracking its URL. TweetReach Trackers can monitor up to 15 separate queries about a single campaign or topic, including one or more URLs. (Full details on setting up topic Trackers here.) Here’s an example of how to set one up for specifically tracking a single Instagram URL:

URL queries should be set up as url_contains:instagram.com/p/utBPU3D5cL or with the full URL in quotes, as in the screenshot above. (You can find more details about specific searches and URL queries here.) This will search for all tweets containing this URL or portion of URL. Be sure that you have the full URL for a particular photo you want to track, since just adding a basic Instagram address (instagram.com) would return information on every Instagram photo posted to Twitter, drowning out the results you want.

Also keep in mind that a Tracker will find all tweets that match any of your search queries and aggregate their metrics together in your Tracker, so make sure all the queries in a Tracker are related; in this case one or more Instagram photos, depending on if you want to track a single photo or a set. You can drill down into some details (usernames, hashtags, URLs, etc…) if you set up all the terms around a campaign, but summary metrics will be calculated for the entire set of tweets.

So if you really want to concentrate on the data for just your Instagram photos, consider setting up a separate Tracker for any hashtags or keywords.

What if I already have a Tracker running, and want to see how the Instagram content I’ve cross-posted is doing?

Great question! First, check the Top URLs section of your Tracker to see if any Instagram links are there:

If you don’t see any, don’t get discouraged. Clicking on the menu bar in the top right corner of that section (the three dots and three lines) will take you to a full list of URLs shared that is automatically ranked by impressions, but you can change that to reflect ranking by tweets, retweets, or contributors as you prefer.

We recommend paying attention to how your Instagram and other visual content URLs rank depending on how you’ve sorted them. This way you can answer some questions about your content strategy so far: How many of your tweets contain Instagram URLs? Do those get retweeted more or less than those with other content type URLs? The answer to these questions can help you tweak your content strategy, including how often and how you share Instagram content via Twitter.

Find even more details

Click through on each high-ranking Instagram link to see what these high performing visual content pieces have in common. Is it a hashtag you used with all of them? The subject matter, like the inclusion of a celebrity spokesperson? It might even just be the lighting, tone (warm or cool), or absence or presence of people in the photos. Finding a common thread in your Instagram posts will let you know how to best present your content for the maximum impact on your audience.

This page will also tell you which day a link was posted when you hover over a spike in the display, letting you know if certain days of the week work better for certain content (because you should repeat these steps with every kind of content that you’re producing, from YouTube videos to blog URLs):

If you have fans and followers who independently share your Instagram URLs to their audiences, you’ll likely see this show up here since they can only share it after you have initially posted it. Watching the performance of a repost from your Instagram account can let you know which of your fans and followers have a strong following of their own. In time you can consider them for a brand ambassador partnership if appropriate, or see if they would be interested in using your product in a sponsored post. You can even just thank and reward them for being a dedicated follower.

The bottom line?

Keeping track of what kind of content consistently performs the best with your audience lets you know what kind of content to plan more of for the future. Knowing how your Instagram content is performing is simply one piece of that puzzle, which TweetReach can help put together.

It’s Friday and that means it’s time for This Week in Social Analytics with our favorite posts of the past week in the world of measurement, analytics, and social media. See a great piece we missed? Link to it in the comments, or tell us about it on Twitter or Facebook.

“. . .it’s becoming a necessity to be different. Your Facebook audience, while procrastinating their commitments ahead of them, will take out a few minutes to scroll through their News Feed. Most likely, they’ll skip anything uninteresting.

So with that in mind, you need to come up with content that’s well worth engaging with for an extended amount of time, which leads to the question:

“Going forward, Instagram will also compete with other emerging social networks for attention among these younger demographics, and by extension, for brands’ ad dollars in reaching those demographics. However, over time, we believe Instagram’s straightforward and simple content feed has wider appeal across all demographics—no matter what age or level of digital savvy.”

“What do you hope to gain from social media? If a high follower count or an overnight viral post is your idea of social success, you may learn the hard way that those things in themselves are not guaranteed to bring you more business. Instead of a one-hit wonder, your main focus should be meaningful interaction, with the end goal of building a dedicated fan base.”

“Online video is quickly becoming one of the most important and inventive parts of the modern marketing mix. It can seem daunting to dive into, but this report offers a good place to start for understanding how much more comprehensive video can be as a weapon in your arsenal when you approach it with a balance of strategy, integration, and measurement.“

“There appears to be an age trend when it comes to following stars on social media, though: 13-year-olds are far more likely to follow a YouTube (59%) than TV/movie (32%) star, while the gap is closer for 14-17-year-olds (53% and 44%, respectively). Among 18-24-year-olds, slightly fewer follow YouTube (51%) than TV/movie (54%) stars.”

This has big implications for brands with certain target demographics who are looking to do celebrity partnerships.

Big studios have had to change marketing tactics to reach audiences where they are, while indie films have a whole new time-and-money-saving way to market. What tactics from the former can help the latter?

“With social data serving as the largest archive of human behavior to ever exist, how can we turn this data into real-time warning systems? I’ll look at how social data has been used in the past, our own research and endeavors and the possibilities we see for social data in humanitarian efforts going forward.”

“This panel will bring together an unprecedented conversation between the creators, platforms, and commentators of the evolving visual frontier of the web. We’ll tackle the latest developments in the space, and give a glimpse of what’s to come.”

“The landscape is changing from measuring success by ‘trending’ to building dedicated fandoms. The fandom conversation peaks after the show airs and continues to resonate until the next episode, and even between seasons.”

“We’ll discuss how musicians can use digital media to express their stories, and invite their fans to emotionally connect with their music, using the best platforms and practices that the digital world has to offer.”

About TweetReach

TweetReach is brought to you by Union Metrics. We focus on delivering powerful social analytics that enable marketers to measure and improve their social media campaigns. We provide analytics across Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr.

Here on our TweetReach blog, we share our favorite Twitter tactics and strategies, as well as company announcements and events.